A discussion thread recently popped up on the ChiBots mailing list to which I subscribe. One of the members had just heard about the BeagleBone Black (BBB) and was curious to how it compars to the Raspberry Pi B. Here's the reply I sent to the list which I thought might be useful to others. And I thought subsequent discussion here would help me flesh out some additional advantages and disadvantages of both:
BBB $45 vs RPi Model B $35: BBB includes 2GB built-in flash & can run off
computer USB port [<500mA] so that would make up the cost
difference if one has to buy SD card and power supply for Pi.
BBB is Open Source Hardware: schematics, layout & BOM, plus it only uses
parts that are avail in low qty. RPi only have schematics released and
its processor is not available (only via high volume contract). I think
BBB is great for design engineers to prototype with and then modify for
their specific application.
BBB has programmable realtime units (PRU or PRUSS): Two 200 Mhz
microcontrollers built-in to its main processor. It is possible to offload realtime control to the PRU where
instructions are single cycle. Great blog posts about PRU:
http://hipstercircuits.com/accelerated-stepper-motors-on-beaglebone/
BBB has no video decode/encode hardware: It does video in software. It
is ARM Cortex A8 (ARM v7) with NEON (vector processing) so it can play
video but it won't be the video workhorse the Pi is. I believe
media center is the best use case for RPi model B over the BBB.
BBB has the ARM v7 instruction set so there is a wider range of distros
available. Things are still in progress post April launch, but the orig
Bone had Android, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Angstrom & many more. The Pi's
ARM v6 instruction set holds it back requiring specialized distros that
recompile packages for the older instruction set (like Raspbian).
BeagleBoard.org and the BeagleBone leaders are passionate about getting
everything in the mainline kernel. They work with Linux kernel
maintainers to get their patches accepted upstream. I've been told they
hope to have everything in the mainline by sometime this year. BBB was a
big jump forward from BB White as they went from Linux 3.2 to Linux 3.8
*and* the shift to Device Tree for configuration of peripherals. This
was been alot of work for the Beagle developers but they are now the first
ARM dev board to embrace DT. This has the advantage of making hardware
configuration as simple change to a config file rather than having to
recompile the kernel. The transition has to be done by an new ARM board
looking to get accepted upstream. TL;DR - BBB has a strong commitment to
running the latest Linux kernel and not getting stuck in some vendor
specific fork of Linux.
Cheers,
Drew
